Soul Calibur VI: General discussion

Remember how I said I was done upscaling SC artwork? I actually can't remember if I did say so, but please pretend I did for the sake of drama.

I LIED!

How could I not upscale the artwork in Broken Destiny's story mode!?

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Crash X said:
I honestly don’t think SCIV has aged well. I’m not a big fan of the slower movement in IV and it feels like it takes away from the game operating on a 3D plain.

For the graphics themselves, the stages honestly still look pretty nice and with some fun attention to detail such as the hungry Lizardmen on Astaroth’s stage. But the character models look pretty bad. Faces look like they’re constantly drinking coffee or on crack and the bodies look as if they’re always covered in grease or sweat. This game imo also has some of the worst designs for the cast I’ve seen in the series. Ivy, Siegfried, Voldo, and Astaroth in particular look especially terrible.

I do like that the roster is pretty faithful for the most part. But the balance between the cast was godawful. The fact that Hilde had a Doom Combo that RO’d you from halfway across the stage was stupid. As for the Star Wars guests, I’m not going to beat a dead horse on about their inclusion within the game (though Vader I didn’t mind too much).


In terms of the mechanics the Critical Finish felt pretty strung along. And you couldn’t take advantage of it at all unless you were using Ivy or Voldo because their attacks shredded the guard gauge. The guard crush as a whole was just nothandled that well in SCIV since it just took so long to get the crush active.

Online, another dead horse to beat. Lag was atrocious, 1A’s were almost unblockable. ‘Nuff said.
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Totally fair. I can see both sides of it. I do like SCIV and remember it through rose-colored glasses. At the same time though, I agree with the points you've made. The character models were gruesome, the gameplay had its rough spots, and the slow speed was as much of a curse as it was a blessing.

I have a love/hate relationship with SCIV that way, so I absolutely understand your issues with it.
 
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In an alternate timeline where SoulCalibur III had gone to arcades first, I really do wonder how differently the series would have gone. The arcade edition of SoulCalibur III is maybe the true best game in the series, but no one got to play it, and then they followed that up with the disappointment that was SoulCalibur IV. Imagining SoulCalibur III with all its content but none of its technical shortcomings is like a perfect world situation for me.
 
Crash X said:
And a lack of polish with all the bugs and glitches.
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Lapsed SC player just getting back into the game with VI here, sorry for inserting myself into the convo but this is one of my buttons. XD

SCIII is also my favorite game in the series, and I think it's a bit unfair to accuse it of lacking polish. It had one bug - granted, that bug (along with the resulting version differences) killed any chance of a competitive console scene, but it's more sad than funny that all it took was VC to ruin the reputation of what was (IMHO) otherwise head-and-shoulders the best game in the franchise (roster, mechanics - especially GI, stages, score, aesthetic, etc.)

[edit: at this point I'm alerted that Dante has posted my exact feelings while I've left the editor open. :P]

I agree with what he or she said, and I think the slow, sad deflation of the SCIII tournament scene only encouraged Namco to lean into the "reinvention" aspect of SCIV. Oddly, I feel SCIII:AE came too soon, if anything. Six months later and with a little extra content it could have maybe merited a console re-release, but basically walling off the fixed version of the game half a year into the title's lifespan only contributed to the community's dissolution. [Rewriting this section, felt awkward.] My feeling is that Namco got the wrong idea with SC3's strong sales and short life, and leaned into the character creation but away from the core gameplay, assuming it needed more flash. To make the game look less "simple" and more cinematic they implemented supers and longer canned combo strings, but the armor-break system contributed to the game state being a lot more difficult to read (with stupidly granular damage boosts to armor-broken areas, and surprise armor-breaks baking in a swingy comeback factor. Also: half-hidden information, like which of Yoshimitsu's Iron Fist moves might come out, or whether Hilde was holding doom combo charge or not.) I disagree with nearly all the changes from 3>4, and feel the bombastically supernatural / less historical tone was a poor choice as well.

I played nearly as much SCIV as I did SCIII, both because of the online matches and because I found a new local scene, but my time with the game was somehow joyless. I played SCV exactly once (GI takes meter? GTFO.) In my time away I've become a much better fighting game player in general, spent quite a bit of time going deep in other games, and considered Soulcalibur a "closed book" with SCIII:AE (still waiting on a home release.) At first I didn't give SC6 a chance, but the last three weeks have been a revelation, and so far Soulcalibur VI has felt like a return to form. I miss the high/low, counter/parry GI game (not a huge fan of reversal edges, I hope 2.0 speeds them up significantly,) and I'm hoping SCVI receives continued funding from Namco to increase the in-game content (characters are on their way but we need more stages!) but this feels like a Soul Calibur game made by devs who actually love the elements that set the franchise apart. If things go well, we may be in the second-best timeline...
 
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DanteSC3 said:
In an alternate timeline where SoulCalibur III had gone to arcades first, I really do wonder how differently the series would have gone. The arcade edition of SoulCalibur III is maybe the true best game in the series, but no one got to play it, and then they followed that up with the disappointment that was SoulCalibur IV. Imagining SoulCalibur III with all its content but none of its technical shortcomings is like a perfect world situation for me.
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It's something I oftentimes wondered myself. Also it always baffled me why Namco made that no-arcade-life distribution decision in the first place.
Makes me realize that nowadays it would just take a small patch to fix it.
 
DanteSC3 said:
In an alternate timeline where SoulCalibur III had gone to arcades first, I really do wonder how differently the series would have gone. The arcade edition of SoulCalibur III is maybe the true best game in the series, but no one got to play it, and then they followed that up with the disappointment that was SoulCalibur IV. Imagining SoulCalibur III with all its content but none of its technical shortcomings is like a perfect world situation for me.
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To be honest, in all my SCIII experience i didn't find any bugs or glitches. But, for me, after replaying SCII, i find SCIII gameplay feels alot slower and limited somehow.
 
Swithin said:
Lapsed SC player just getting back into the game with VI here, sorry for inserting myself into the convo but this is one of my buttons. XD

SCIII is also my favorite game in the series, and I think it's a bit unfair to accuse it of lacking polish. It had one bug - granted, that bug (along with the resulting version differences) killed any chance of a competitive console scene, but it's more sad than funny that all it took was VC to ruin the reputation of what was (IMHO) otherwise head-and-shoulders the best game in the franchise (roster, mechanics - especially GI, stages, score, aesthetic, etc.)
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And that’s cool. If you find SCIII to be your favourite game in the series then I can respect that and understand why that is to be the case. But personally, if a game has a bug/glitch that can be a burden on the experience of the game itself (such as the grab bug that resets the thrower while the opponent is stuck in their animation in III) then I honestly think it’s worth noting the lack of polish in certain aspects.
 
Crash X said:
And that’s cool. If you find SCIII to be your favourite game in the series then I can respect that and understand why that is to be the case. But personally, if a game has a bug/glitch that can be a burden on the experience of the game itself (such as the grab bug that resets the thrower while the opponent is stuck in their animation in III) then I honestly think it’s worth noting the lack of polish in certain aspects.
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I don't mean to sound like I'm arguing (this was a very friendly reply!) but I do want to continue this for just a moment. When I hear the term "lack of polish", I usually read it to mean that something has been left half-finished, or that no particular care was put into crafting it. In this regard, Soul Calibur III is more like an amazingly detailed painting with a giant gash ripped down the center of the canvas: I'm not arguing that the artwork itself isn't compromised, only that the damage is obscuring the labor that went into it before it was ruined.

If you know the whole history I don't mean to just repeat it at you (also, others might not know this,) but the VC glitch was a very late addition to the code. When the demo disc dropped in OPS 98 (still have it somewhere) people were hyped for the game. The only thing that wasn't received well was the continued inclusion of Step G from SCII. We were getting quite a bit of inside-baseball details back in the day from WCMaxi on the Guard Impact forums, and people were repeating the need for 22G to be toned down. Apparently there was reluctance to do this on the dev team, but the message finally reached them and convinced them to implement the change something like a month to two weeks before the code was to be finalized. The "fix" was, of course, the variable cancel glitch. :/

I remember the hand-wringing, the arguments over whether or not to ban, how to police, and later which version to run as tourney standard, etc. I'm not surprised that people might still carry an "f this game" mentality. I'm just saying it seems a bit unfair to me to label the whole game "unpolished" because of one last minute game-breaking bug that wasn't caught before ship. Was the game broken? Sure. Was it unwise to implement the change that late in the dev cycle? 100% (although I agree that Step G shouldn't have even made it that far.) The saddest part is that they broke the game by listening to the fans and trying to give them what they wanted - I'd argue we'd be better off had they stopped polishing sooner.

[Edit: Got curious and looked it up as I couldn't remember clearly. Apparently, the demo for SCIII dropped with Official Playstation Magazine 98 (OPS being different from PSM,) with a cover date of November 2005 (which would be after the game came out.) I remember picking it up months before then, I think before I left the country for that summer. Strange how the cover date and street date varied so wildly, but it was somewhere in the April-June window. For certain though I remember the demo having the godlike 22G.]
 
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Someone discovered how much input delay is added with each "frame delay" setting in training mode. If you select 5 bars, it's represented as an input delay of 3 frames.

If that accurately represents the lag you get when playing online with a 5-bar connection, then I just wanna casually point out that playing online on the PC version against people with a 5-bar connection gives you less input delay than playing the PS4 version offline.

You may now proceed to panic.
 
Dissidia said:
@DanteSC3 do you have a link or source for yun-seong meaning star? I'm looking for translation that matches up
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It comes down to the specific hanja that Yun-seong’s name uses for “seong”. As a given name, it has a lot of different possible meanings, but his name is written 洪潤星 (Hong Yun-seong, family name Hong, given name Yun-seong):

星 (별 성 byeol seong): "star"

For whatever it’s worth, Hwang’s name uses this same hanja (黄星京, Hwang Seong-gyeong, family name Hwang, given name Seong-gyeong), but Mi-na’s does not, because Seong is her family name and it only has one hanja for family name, which always means “succeed” or “accomplish” (成美那, Seong Mi-na, family name Seong, given name Mi-na).

It’s also weirdly inconsistent that we refer to Hwang as Hwang instead of Seong-gyeong. :sc3hwang1:
 
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